Computers and Education: Teaching Virtuality

Questions to start

• What role do computers and the internet/web play in education today?
• What role will they play in the future?
• What role should they play?
• Your thoughts ...

Issues

• Real world versus virtual worlds
• Computing/internet web: adjuncts to traditional education versus opening for new/better educational practices
• Education as mastery versus education as development of inquiry skills

Acknowledging the virtual in "reality"

• Optical illusions: seeing as "informed guessing"
• Ambiguous figures: changing the guesses
• Learning to challenge the guess
• Perception, understanding as challengeable "stories"
• Impossible figures: using the ability to challenge to make new things
• Implications for education
  • Understanding is different, will be achieved differently in different people
  • Understanding needs to be created, not absorbed
  • Requirement for open-ended, transactional inquiry as classroom mode
  Your thoughts?

• Seeing what could not otherwise be seen
  • Conway's Game of Life without a computer
  • With a computer
  • Asking further questions
• Distributed systems, emergence, implications for classroom practice

• An example
• Observe, wonder, create story, test, use to imagine new questions
• Some additional examples
• Strengths and limitations of computer modelling

• The line between reality and the virtual is becoming, will continue to become increasingly blurred
• Students need (have always needed?) to acquire increased sophistication in working in the space between reality and the virtual ... in virtuality
• Computers and virtual worlds have an important role to play in enhancing such sophistication
• Computer models, like any other subject of exploration, need to be approached as incentives for inquiry rather than as answers